What is an ancestor page?

[Joelle Beasley]

I am trying to find out what an ancestor page is. I have macros on my site that refer to them and I'd like to understand more about what they are and what they do.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_ · Accepted solution]

In Confluence, pages are organized into a tree structure.

(Mathematically speaking, it is a forest, because it can contain multiple trees. Also, it can be a flat list, if you don't organize them into a hierarchy, that's also legal.)

That means that each page, except the ones in the topmost level, have a parent. A parent can also have its own parent, which is the grandparent of the original page. Parent, grandparent, etc. are called together ancestors.

See a hierarchy like this:

• A
  • B
  • C
    • D
      • E
      • F

Here F has the parent D, but F's ancestors are D, C, A.

You need ancestors, because you need hierarchy. And you need hierarchy, because it makes  navigating and working in most spaces easier.

[Taryn Miller-Rigg]

What a great explanation!

[Ranjit_Lafeguera]

Thank you for that explanation!

I also have a question and I will modify your sample hierarchy below to understand it better: 

• A
  • B
    • B1
  • C
    • D
      • E
      • F

So, I am on page B1, and I need to get the info of page C (and maybe it's descendants), how can I able to do that? What key should I use?

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

So, in this example C is a so-called sibling of B1's parent.

how can I able to do that? What key should I use?

There is no easy way to search for it in CQL, if this is what you meant.